New York and Melbourne in tech-ological embrace

By Michael Dwyer

12 July 2018 — 11:45pm

The gig was as secret as they get. No posters, no flyers, no Facebook event. In the backroom of a Fitzroy bar last winter, maybe a dozen punters sat in the dark and witnessed something happening for the first and last time.

It started with some noises. Creaky bass rumbles and keys, the rattle of percussion as slowly, a landscape emerged from the mist. Voices began to growl and skitter.

Kimbra (singing) says Exo-Tech can be liberating and a little terrifying at the same time.Credit:Arts Centre Melbourne

International pop sensation Kimbra – for yes, it was she – crouched on the floor facing her friend Sophia Brous, as their whispering voices began to coo and wail and spiral up each other's spines.

Jeremy Gustin, a drummer visiting from New York for the weekend's Supersense Festival, dropped a loose, swinging beat and the road suddenly loomed into view. Now we were going somewhere. Nobody, on stage or off, had a clue where.

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It was all very, very exciting.

"It's liberating and I guess a little terrifying," Kimbra reflects of the process that drives the Exo-Tech collective.

"We're all stepping into a space where your inhibitions have to come down. If you bring in a lot of tension or ego or need-to-prove, it can become like lasagne, where everybody is planting ideas on top of each other.

"If you come in as a listener, really work on being sensitive to the energies around you and see what you can offer to take the idea in a new direction, then it becomes exciting because everything is up for grabs and anything can happen."

A lot has happened in the two years since Kimbra and Brous, the Melbourne expat best known here for her jazz/ experimental festivals Overground and Supersense, dreamed up the Exo-Tech recipe in a bar in Brooklyn.

David Byrne, Questlove, Sean Lennon and Cibo Matto's Yuka Honda are among the larger identities who have wandered into the morphing ensemble's democratic creative space.

Performing in a centre-facing circle with New York guitarist Dave Harrington, Appalachian fiddler Cleek Schrey, clarinettist Douglas Wieselman and half-a-dozen other quiet achievers of New York's jazz, pop, film and avant garde sprawl, Honda is among those on board next week's Melbourne return.

"It's not jamming randomly, it's more about spontaneous composing," she says. "Sometimes when you jam you're not really looking for structure. You're just mingling and dancing with each other, but with Exo-Tech we're trying to compose a song on the spot.

"We're trying to come up with the structure by suppressing ourselves and being very spontaneous, but trying to make everything meaningful," she says, laughing as words begin to fail.

They fail for good reason: the conversation between these musicians mostly takes place on stage. "I can't say I know them really well," Honda says. "For instance Dave Harrington, I met him at one of the Exo-Tech shows. We said 'Hello, nice to meet you', and then performed together.

"It's a really interesting situation. Musicians can just meet and start playing music and you find out who they are on stage. When you meet a person [offstage] you are face-to-face ... but when you're playing together I think you are all talking to the god of music. It's not so much about you or them. We are all just elements in this wonderland of music."

The sky may be the limit, but the ground is pretty well defined in Exo-Tech world. "Everything," says Kimbra, "is built off the groove.

"You sort of set up this ambience, noises, but as soon as the beat drops, that's when the song reveals itself. When [Gustin] comes in with this gunshot rhythm it demands everyone starts going for it. We have to surrender our bodies and say, 'OK, let's go'."

Exo-Tech performs one show only in Australia on July 18 in the round on the stage of the State Theatre, supported by Yuka Honda's Eucademix and the Dave Harrington Trio.